THE AVIATOR
Bundled head-to-toe in their fur-lined flight suits, Edmond Genet, Edwin Parsons, and James “Mac” McConnell, pilots of the famed Lafayette Escadrille in World War I, walked across an airfield in Saint Juste, France, to their Nieuport 17 biplanes. McConnell, suffering from a wrenched back (the result of a horrific crackup), had to have his French mechanics help him into his bucket seat. Soon, the three aluminum-painted aircraft were bobbing in close formation in the cold, misty skies above Ham, 80 miles north of Paris. Although it was just 9 o’clock in the morning of March 19, 1917, this was the squadron’s third patrol of the day. The three pilots had been ordered to protect the larger, more cumbersome observation machines soaring above no man’s land.
Flying low at first, the pilots could easily see the French cavalry overrunning the countryside. In this sector the Germans were in full retreat, pulling back to a heavily fortified position known as the Hindenburg Line. Having systematically destroyed all the abandoned towns and villages, the Germans were leaving behind a barren, burned-out, and abused landscape. “Before we had gone very far Parsons was forced to go back on account of motor trouble,” Genet wrote two days later. But he and Mac kept going. Genet reported that at about 10 o’clock, “Mac suddenly headed into the German lines toward Saint Quentin and I naturally followed close to his rear and above him.”
Well inside hostile territory the American airmen encountered two enemy single-seaters—dark green fish-like Albatros D.IIIs—and accelerated into combat. McConnell and Genet quickly lost track of each other in the swirling melee that ensued. Within moments, one of Genet’s left airfoils was torn apart by a stream of explosive bullets—projectiles banned by the 1899 Hague Convention because they were considered inhumane. “I was momentarily stunned by part of [the airfoil],” he recalled, noting that it “dug a nasty gouge into my left cheek.” A battery of enemy antiaircraft guns now joined the fray, their shells exploding into ominous spider shapes.
Also locked in a circling dance of death, McConnell and the other German each jockeyed for an advantage, sometimes darting
